Industrial process control and automation systems are often used to automate large and complex industrial processes. These types of systems routinely include sensors, actuators, and controllers. Some of the controllers receive measurements from the sensors and generate control signals for the actuators.
Human-machine interfaces (HMIs) are often used in process control and automation systems to provide information graphically to operators or other users. HMI applications targeted to industrial process control and automation markets typically need to provide continuous views to industrial processes being monitored or controlled. This is often accomplished using a number of process graphics that represent an entire industrial process via a number of smaller functional processes. Each process graphic may contain numerical and graphical elements that represent the corresponding functional process to be monitored or controlled.
Large industrial processes may require numerous process graphics for a single HMI application. These process graphics are typically created manually, such as by using process graphic building applications based on piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), engineering procurement and construction (EPC) documents, or models or ontologies that represent an industrial process. Creating these process graphics manually is very labor-intensive and allows inconsistencies to occur in HMI styles across process graphics. Also as graphical rendering technology evolves, there is a need to migrate existing process graphics that represent industrial processes to the new rendering technology. These pre-existing graphics may have been created tens of years ago and may not follow current best practice guidelines. Consequently many displays are completely redesigned. Creating the new rendering technology version of the process graphics manually is very labor-intensive.